Day: October 13, 2014

As promised here’s the next step with which I will try and help you get organised – to make your email life a bit easier.

The thing is, it doesn’t have to be that complicated, nor should it be so easy that it’s not really helping you at all.

Like me, you are probably going to use your phone (smart or not) to see your emails periodically throughout the day. Then in the evening, or perhaps at lunchtime, you will pop onto your laptop or PC at home to read them properly and reply to any which weren’t urgent.

If you have than one email address, how are you accessing your accounts? Are you logging in to each one separately? You don’t need to. You can have all of your accounts come in to one and see all your messages at the same time. Sadly, there is more than one way to do this, but I will try to be as succinct as possible with my clarification as this is how I do it.

First off, please remember that I will always refer to Gmail accounts. I neither use nor like any of the HoYol (remember = Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL) ones as they are sooooo unprofessional – and although I know something about how they do things, I’m not going to compare them. Gmail/Googlemail can do it and that’s good enough for me and these little articles of mine. (That’s not to say you can’t do similar things with those accounts, so you may well get some ideas.)

As I have mentioned before, most of my accounts come through to a single Gmail account. I have email addresses for my several domains, as well as lots of Gmail ones. Three Gmail ones I keep separately – unlinked to one another – simply because that’s how I prefer to work. But even my oldest Gmail comes into what I now consider to be my main account. I even have a couple of Gmail accounts with similar names to my domains, simply because it’s easier to manage everything from one place. And that’s the key – doing as much as possible with a single login. You know, I can even reply from whichever account was written to automatically – or overwrite that with another account reply-to address if I want to. And sometimes I do.

I set them all up from my main account using settings – accounts and import – and once done, I just had to confirm in the other account that this is what I want to do. I could, but haven’t bothered, have each account’s messages labelled/filtered so that I can see what’s come from where. But because I have also set everything up so that I reply as if from the actual account to which the message was sent, that doesn’t seem so necessary. (I’ve just had a look and see that I have 13 accounts all coming into one, of which seven are from my domains.

What is really important, is for you to know what can be done – then you can decide whether you want to do it or not. It’s very much like computer software. All Word Processors do similar things, they just do them in subtly different ways. It’s funny too, because even switching between them, you seem to automatically work the way the program does as if by instinct. Very similar to driving different types of vehicle every day (I used to be a ‘bus and coach driver as well as motorbikes and plain ordinary push bikes!).

There’s also a way in which you can have mail ‘collected’ by Gmail and brought into one account. If you haven’t yet realised it, the method I have described above depends on you setting up a filter form ‘the other’ account, so that it ends up in your main one. But Gmail can use POP mail to collect messages – although I found that to be very slow in actual operation.

To finish this post I’d like to offer a little snippet of a tip.

Do you have a hobby or interest? Are you fed up with writing your name and address at the bottom of every message? Well, you can set up your own signature line or section, which can include a web address, short message, or such like. Here’s the one I currently have on my Archery email account: